Only 90s web developers remember this (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#101

Post by macintux » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

My contributions to the nostalgia parade:

- http://blooberry.com/indexdot/html/index.html

- http://blooberry.com/indexdot/css/index.html

- https://web.mit.edu/wwwdev/www/cgic.html

And I haven't really done any web programming since cgic days, thankfully.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#102

Post by robbyking » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

The comments on this page are very clearly divided between people who at the time were professional web developers and people who were teen code explorers, and I love them both.

I never thought I'd feel nostalgic for that time in my life.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#103

Post by pimlottc » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

I expected the part about buttons to talk about mouseovers. That was wizardry back in the day, making 3D-shaded buttons that animated as when the cursor was over them, and then changing color or something when you clicked. Impressed the hell out of people.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#104

Post by JasonFruit » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

tlackemann wrote: post #9

Less we forget about What an amazing time. Felt like the wild west back then.

My contrarian take for the day: I liked frames. It was a nice built-in way to provide consistent site-level navigation and context when your styling options were otherwise pretty limited. The only problem was when it broke navigation outside the site, which was a pretty bad design decision and took a lot of self-discipline to prevent.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#105

Post by gear54rus » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:23 PM UTC

robbyking wrote: post #95

DerekBickerton wrote: post #65

1x1 pixel GIFs are still in use on places like Amazon where the 1x1 GIF image is overlayed on top of another (larger) image. It's to stop people right-clicking and saving the larger image to their device (because copyright). Anyways I can just press F12 and 'steal' the image from devtools, so it's not hard to overcome.

I recently came across an image I wasn't able to download using dev tools and was shocked. I wish I had had the time to figure it out.

Link the page please?:)

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#106

Post by jspash » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #92

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #79

The awesome thing about that period was how we learned. You'd be on a web page, see something funky (positioning, rounded corners, etc) and be like "how the heck did they do that?". Then you do the ol' "View Source" and now that technique is in your toolkit. In fact you'd prob head right over to your geocities site and try it out right away.

With developer tools, this has only gotten easier.

Except now it just shows

Good luck with that!

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#107

Post by supermatt » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

robbyking wrote: post #93

supermatt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it is dynamic. But the author also mentioned putting spacer gifs in semantically appropriate containers, so I think it may have been a joke?

I worked at homeshark.com (later rebranded iown.com) in the 90's, and we absolutely did the spacer gif trick to size our tables.

Oh yeah, i think every one did - but they certainly werent used in "semantically correct containers".

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#108

Post by thought_alarm » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

davidbarker wrote: post #11

That's the first time I've heard DHTML to mean "distributed HTML" — I always knew it to mean "dynamic HTML".

DHTML means using Javascript to animate multiple LAYER tags inside of Netscape Communicator 4. The "D" stands for "Daft".

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#109

Post by silisili » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

davidmurdoch wrote: post #56

tyingq wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the same reason we started to like flat buttons?

Wait, some people actually like flat buttons?

Sarcastic or not, I really, really hate flat buttons. This is one area where I feel skeumorphic design works. Make it apparent I can push it. Today everything looks like a label, and good luck figuring out if it's active or not.

Re: Only 90s web developers remember this (2014)

#110

Post by ctippett » Sun, Nov 21, 2021, 6:27 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #26

- rounded corners with images - searching for random Perl scripts to FTP into your cgi-bin folder

Not just using images for rounded corners, but drop-shadow effects too. Of course, that required 8 or so different gifs to cover all four sides of a container, including separate images for the corners.